TUG Interview Corner

There are two ideas behind these interviews: (a) technology
is created by and evolves with use by people, and the points of view
and backgrounds of the people influence the technology;
(b) there are lots of people who are relatively new to the
TeX community and therefore do not know much about the people who are
already significant contributors to the community.

This Interview Corner is coordinated by Dave Walden, who has spent
a lifetime in computer R&D but who is a relative newcomer to TeX and
its friends (albeit a serious user
of them, cf. TeX Land). Thus, Dave is
representative of many relatively new users of TeX who are interested
in knowing more about past and current contributors to the TeX
community.

Interview subjects are chosen based on (a) seeking diversity
in many dimensions, (b) recommendations from people about who
should be interviewed, and (c) potential interview subjects
being willing to be interviewed. If you'd like to suggest subjects for
future interviews, or are interested in conducting interviews yourself,
please contact us.

Barbara Beeton (interview completed 2005-11-24):Barbara Beeton has been editor of TUGboat for 22 years and a
member of the TUG Board since it was called the steering committee. She
also serves as a liaison for TeXnical issues between Donald Knuth and
the TeX community.

Karl Berry (interview completed 2005-09-27):Karl Berry has been a long-time board member of TUG, became TUG president in 2003, and was subsequently elected for
further terms. Among other projects, he is co-administrator of the
tug.org server, co-editor of TeX Live,
and a member of the TUGboat production
team.

Duane Bibby (interview completed 2006-05-19):Cartoonist Duane Bibby is well known for the lion illustrations used in numerous TeX books, starting with The
TeXbook, and by TeX user groups.

Jon Breitenbucher (interview completed 2008-05-22):Jon Breitenbucher is interested in the use of TeX in educational situations and is a member of the TUG board.

Mimi Burbank (interview completed 2005-09-06):Mimi Burbank (1941–2010) served as a member of the TUGboat
production team and and a member of the TUG board.

David Carlisle (interview completed 2007-06-20):David Carlisle is a member of the LaTeX team and deeply involved with issues of typesetting and displaying mathematics,
including being an Invited Expert on the W3C Math Working Group.

Bart Childs (interview completed 2010-05-10):Bart Childs was extensively involved in the early distribution of TeX and early governance of TUG.

Jin-Hwan Cho (interview completed 2007-05-21):Jin-Hwan Cho is the maintainer of the DVIPDFMx translator, and a leader in supporting and encouraging the use of TeX in
Korea.

Malcolm Clark (interview completed 2011-02-09):Malcolm Clark is a past president of TUG

John Culleton (interview completed 2006-12-02):John Culleton uses TeX in his indexing and typesetting business. He also participates in various Internet-based
discussion groups related to printing and publishing where he is vocal
about using TeX for typesetting.

Susan DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin (interview completed 2007-10-11):Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is
secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in
their technical typing work.

Victor Eijkhout (interview completed 2005-03-21):Victor Eijkhout is the author of the book TeX
by Topic and several LaTeX packages, a long-time participant on
comp.text.tex and various mailing lists, and was formerly associate
TUGboat editor for macros.

Thomas Esser (interview completed 2006-06-05):Thomas Esser created and maintained the popular teTeX distribution of TeX.

Jonathan Fine (interview completed 2008-12-14):Jonathan Fine is a long time participant in the TeX community. He is current chair of the UK TeX Users Group and is
employed supporting TeX at the Open University.

Ulrike Fischer (interview completed 2009-11-20):Ulrike Fischer is very active in various on-line TeX discussion groups and has written several chess-related packages.

Peter Flynn (interview completed 2006-09-19):Peter has worked on TeX interfaces at many levels for many
years, including SGML, XML, dual web and print presentations, within
the context of excellent typography. He is also a past board member
of TUG.

David Fuchs (interview completed 2007-05-14):David Fuchs is renowned in the TeX community for his work with Donald Knuth in the earliest days of TeX.

Federico Garcia-de Castro (interview completed 2016-08-17):Federico Garcia-De Castro is a composer of music, passionate for chess, and a lover of TeX.

Michel Goossens (interview completed 2013-06-14):Michel Goossens is well known for the LaTeX Companion books and was president of TUG from 1995–1997

Peter Gordon (interview completed 2008-01-08):Peter Gordon is the editor at Addison Wesley for Donald Knuth's books and the company's TeX and LaTeX books.

George Grätzer (interview completed 2005-04-13):George Grätzer is a mathematician who has written books on TeX and LaTeX and edits a journal prepared in LaTeX.

Eitan Gurari (profile compiled in July 2009; Eitan died before we could do an interview):Eitan Gurari was a long term contributor to the TeX community. He was on our list to interview, but
we had not gotten to him yet at the time of his death.
This profile was compiled after his death.

Hans Hagen (interview completed 2006-03-02):Hans Hagen is the principal author and developer of ConTeXt, past president of
NTG, and active in many other areas of the
TeX community.

Idris Hamid (interview completed 2009-11-01):Idris is best known in the TeX community for his work in developing better typesetting for Arabic-script languages such as Arabic, Persian, and
Urdu.

Hàn Thế Thành (interview completed 2008-07-24):Hàn Thế Thành is the creator of and still maintains pdfTeX.

Yannis Haralambous (interview completed 2009-01-06):Yannis Haralambous is well known for his Omega system and his study of non-Latin fonts.

Jim Hefferon (interview completed 2007-08-13):Jim Hefferon is one of the key maintainers of CTAN and a member of the TUG board.

Amy Hendrickson (interview completed 2008-09-14):Amy Hendrickson has made her living for over twenty years as a TeX/LaTeX macro writer for publishing companies and academic societies;
she also does book production and teaches LaTeX.

John Hobby (interview completed 2010-01-05):John Hobby was the developer of MetaPost and helped develop the Metafont algorithms.

Taco Hoekwater (interview completed 2006-10-13):Taco Hoekwater is heavily involved in implementing many significant upgrades and improvements to various TeX-based systems.

Klaus Höppner (interview completed 2005-02-20):Klaus Höppner is the president of DANTE, the German TeX user group and
a member of the TUG board.

Jonathan Kew (interview completed 2007-04-03):Jonathan Kew is best known in the TeX community as the developer of XeTeX.

Dick Koch (interview completed 2007-07-12):Dick Koch is the creator and lead developer of TeXShop, a renowned front end for TeX on MacOSX.

Werner Lemberg (interview completed 2006-04-28):Werner Lemberg developed the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) package for LaTeX and has been involved in a number
of other computer-based typesetting projects.

Raph Levien (interview completed 2009-05-16):Raph Levien is a programmer with a special interest in graphics applied to type. He is also a typeface designer. He holds
several patents and is a past maintainer of Ghostscript.

Frank Liang (interview completed 2010-07-28):Frank Liang worked with Don Knuth on the hyphenation algorithm for TeX78, and Frank's PhD thesis presented a better hyphenation
algorithm that was used in the TeX we know today and has been used by many
other typesetting systems.

David MacKay (interview completed 2009-02-10):David MacKay (1967–2016) was a scientist at Cambridge University and an enthusiastic user of LaTeX.

Pierre MacKay (interview done in early 2007):Pierre MacKay (1933–2015) was
a classics professor
who was a TUG board member from 1983–1991, TUG president
from 1983–1985, and Unix site coordinator from
1983–1992. He was with TUG from the start.

Adriana McCrea and Aleksander Simonic (interview completed 2006-06-28):Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor
popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.

Frank Mittelbach (interview completed 2006-01-11):Frank Mittelbach has been the leader of the LaTeX Project for many years.

Ross Moore (interview completed 2007-12-12):Ross Moore is a long-time TUG board member and TeX contributor, especially in the areas of mathematics and Unicode
support.

Arthur Ogawa (interview completed 2008-07-14):Arthur Ogawa is a long time member of the TUG board and well-known package developer.

Haruhiko Okumura (interview completed 2007-06-04):Haruhiko Okumura promotes and supports the use of TeX in Japan.

Richard Palais (interview completed 2011-07-09):Dick Palais was the first president (then called the chairman) of TUG

Oren Patashnik (interview completed 2016-06-26):Oren Patashnik is well known as the creator of BibTeX; his graduate student days at Stanford overlapped with the
TeX Project era and people.

Steve Peter (interview completed 2006-02-07):Steve Peter is a publisher and linguist, does freelance book design and typesetting, and uses TeX daily. He is also a member of the TUG board.

Michael Plass (interview completed 2009-12-20):Michael Plass was co-implementor of the original prototype for TeX.

Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt (interview completed 2007-10-11):Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is
secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in
their technical typing work.

Norbert Preining (interview completed 2011-04-10):Norbert is deeply involved in the TeX Live and Debian TeX development.

Arthur Reutenauer (interview completed 2009-03-03):Arthur Reutenauer is the president of Groupe francophone des utilisateurs de TeX (GUTenberg) and is active in other
aspects of TeX use and development.

Yuri Robbers (interview completed 2008-08-24):Yuri Robbers is a TeX user and is a production editor for The PracTeX Journal as well as maintaining the journal's web
site.

Will Robertson (interview completed 2007-03-25):Like many graduate students, Will Robertson has gotten involved with TeX; he is also representative of a minority of
such TeX-using graduate students who take the next step of contributing
significantly to the TeX community.

Christian Schenk (interview completed 2006-04-15):Christian Schenk is the author and principal developer of the popular MiKTeX distribution of TeX.

Rainer Schöpf (interview completed 2007-08-27):Rainer Schöpf was a co-founder of the LaTeX2e and CTAN projects, and is still a key maintainer of CTAN.

Herb Schulz (interview completed 2011-02-01):Herb Schulz is well known for the support he gives to users in the MacTeX world

Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea (interview completed 2006-06-28):Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor
popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.

Phil Taylor (interview completed 2005-05-25):Philip Taylor is a long time TeX user/developer who chooses to work outside of the LaTeX framework. He
is also a member of the TUG board.

Christina Thiele (interview completed 2005-03-24):Christina Thiele has been typesetting with TeX since 1983, especially in
linguistics and other non-math/science fields. She is a past president
of TUG.

Luis Trabb Pardo (interview completed 2010-04-08):Donald Knuth has said that Luis Trabb Pardo was his “right hand man” for the development of TeX78.

Howard Trickey (interview completed 2010-03-23):Howard Trickey did one of the earliest ports of TeX to Unix.

Boris Veytsman (interview completed 2011-01-19):Boris Veytsman has written and maintains
many LaTeX and font-related packages and recently joined the TUG Board of Directors

Mari Voipio (interview completed 2012-12-08):Mari Voipio uses ConTeXt and other TeX-world tools in her daily work and for her hobbies

Herbert Voß (interview completed 2010-08-31):Herbert is best known for
his work with PSTricks and his German language books documenting LaTeX, etc

Dave Walden (interview completed 2006-09-20):Dave Walden coordinates the TUG Interview Corner. This interview of him is intended to provide an answer to the question
some readers may have: “Who is this guy and why is he interviewing
TeX luminaries?”

Joe Weening (interview completed 2010-06-08):Joe Weening used TeX78 when he was first at Stanford, participated in the transition to TeX82, and continues to use (La)TeX
today.

Gerben Wierda (interview completed 2006-11-28):Gerben Wierda is well known for his tools for installing TeX and other capabilities on MacOSX systems.

Peter Wilson (interview completed 2006-11-08):Peter Wilson is the author of the well-known memoir class, has been involved with the development of several other
classes, and has worked extensively with fonts. In the photo he is
operating a Chandler & Price 1910 old style hand press and is in the
process of inserting a sheet of paper to print on the second side.

Joseph Wright (interview completed 2009-10-21):Joseph is a relatively new arrival to the world of TeX development, particularly working in
the area of improving LaTeX support for chemistry. He also is a member of the
LaTeX3 team.

In preparation for TUG 2010:
TeX's 25 anniversary, we tried to expand
our interview series to include Stanford students who worked with Don
Knuth to develop TeX and METAFONT in the late 1970s and into the
mid-1980s. The TeX Project people we interviewed are:

The TeX Community Blog is
doing its own interview series. Originally Paulo Cereda did the
interviews, but others in the community later joined Paulo during the
interview sessions. They have a dedicated chatroom for interviewing
their members; anyone can visit the chatroom and submit questions to the
interviewee, and Paulo serves in an editorial role.

Twenty
Questions for Donald Knuth: for the publication of the eBook
versions of TAOCP, questions for Knuth were collected from various
people, he answered them, and the "virtual Q&A" was posted on the web.